NFS + ESXi

[hdejongh]

Hello,

i want to use a folder as an image library for my esx enviroment.
So i added a disk to freenas, created a volume on it and created a folder on that volume:
/mnt/Volum1/images

Created the NFS share and try to add it to esx. Which wont work (btw my current windows nfs share works fine on the esx servers)

The problem: these are the things that vmware needS:

Ensure the NFS server supports NFSv3 over TCP. ESX/ESXi does not use UDP for NFS.
The NFS server must be accessible in read-write mode by all ESX/ESXi hosts.
The NFS server must allow read-write access for the root system account (rw).
The NFS export must be set for either no_root_squash or chmod 1777.
Ensure the ESX/ESXi VMkernel IP is allowed to mount the NFS share by inspecting the export list.
Ensure the mount is exported by running exportfs -a to re-export all NFS shares.
Check the following to ensure that the ESX/ESXi host is correctly configured to use an NFS share:

Where can i set the no_root_squash setting?

Thanks!

 

[ProtoSD]

The trouble is that FreeNAS builds files like /etc/exports from its database during boot. If you manually edit /etc/exports it will be lost when you reboot. The database/GUI currently doesn't have a field to add/store additional settings like this. You can possibly try copying the existing /etc/exports to /conf/base/etc/exports (you need to do 'mount -uw' first), and then editing the /conf/base/etc version. There's no guarantee this will work, but it's something to try. Version 8.1 will have support for more of this type of thing when it comes out sometime next year, ~summer 2012?

 

[praecorloth]

An alternative to NFS would be iSCSI. Would you be opposed to using that? If you wanted to go that route you would want a second NIC for your FreeNAS box and your ESXi box, unless you're talking about a non-production environment in which case you can get away with cramming VM disk drive, network, and management traffic over one NIC.